Reports arrived to say incendiaries had set fire to the top of the telephone exchange and once again stirrup pumps and buckets of water were rushed upstairs where the ceiling above the equipment was burning steadily.

In his painstaking The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Truth, Fritz Tobias concluded that the fire was the work of a lone incendiary, Marinus van der Lubbe.

This was something the Anglo-Saxons seem to have understood, as their legislation focused on malicious destruction of single trees by incendiaries, not willful setting of forest fires.

Origin

This comes via French, from Latin incandescere ‘glow’, based on candidus ‘white’ ( see candidate). The prefix in- here intensifies the meaning. The incense (Middle English) that you burn comes from the related candere ‘to glow’, while the word meaning ‘to inflame with anger’ comes from the related incendere ‘set fire to’ also found in incendiary (Late Middle English).